I don't know how many of you know the book The Catcher in the Rye, but we read it last year in the best class I've ever taken called The Coming of Age novel. Thinking about Nicolas Scoby and how I was sobbing over his suicide, I realized some interesting parallels that Scoby has to the main character in TCITR, Holden Caulfield. For those of you who don't know, I'll do a little summarizing and biography-ing below for your edification.
So, TCITR is a short-but-long one/two day journey of a teenage boy named Holden Caulfield. It's the end of the winter semester, and Holden is slated to be expelled from his prestigious all-boys boarding school after being expelled from a long list of other schools. He decides to dip before the semester is officially over and goes wandering around Central Park (in New York) to wait things out. By the end of the novel, the day has passed and the Holden from two years later looks back on this little adventure as a time when he (maybe) grew up a little.
Holden has a very distinct characteristic in that, like Scoby, on the outside, he is very cool and has a facade of being very adult and somewhat mature, but on the inside, he likes childhood and the innocence and purity that comes with it and wants to cherish it. He's uncomfortable with sexual relations with women though he talks about it with his school buddies, he's nice to strangers, and he wants to go back to a time when things were simpler, like in his childhood.
This, I think, is the essence of Scoby's spiral into depression. Basketball, the real essence of basketball, is the childhood memory of it; the purity of just playing the game for the fun of it, no money or pride on the line, just pure simple fun. This was only possible for him during his childhood - everything past that forces some amount of expectation on him. Later, when we see his breakdown and "homesickness", we see that he's trying to bring elements of Hillside to Boston, but more than that he's trying to bring quintessential elements of his childhood back to Boston. Most importantly, these attempts are futile - the smog from the cars he brings back eventually disapates, which I think is a metaphor for how the time of his childhood is gone - time only moves forward, and Scoby can't handle that to a certain extent. His inability to go back to a simpler time when basketball and a god wasn't all he was depresses him and is what ultimately drives him to commit suicide.
Dang, this is really good! I see a lot of Holden in Scoby now. Scoby really just wants things to go back to like they were when he played basketball on the playground of his middle school, and Holden just wants to back to his childhood and play with his brother and sister. Passing of time is incredibly painful for both of them, and I, too, was devastated by Scoby's suicide. It's so intriguing (and a bit disturbing) how matter-of-fact Scoby's friends seemed to be surrounding his death.
ReplyDelete*sorry forgot to add this to my last comment* also, throughout much of TCITR, Holden is concerned with people being "phonies"; fake people who just seek social approval without considering actual human emotion. A lot of the people seeking Scoby were quite similar - just out to exploit his basketball skill and only concerned with his "quickness-to-speed" ratio rather than his humanity.
ReplyDeleteYour comparison of Scoby to Holden is compelling, and I would compare Holden as narrator to Gunnar as narrator, too--with both, there's this idea that sarcasm and humor can be a form of moral authority (if you can make fun of it, you own it), but with both, we come to see that humor as a thin veil over some serious depression and discontent with the world as it is. There is an attractive resilience in the ability to continually make fun of everything that's stupid and cruel and absurd about the world, but how sustaining is this, in the end? Beatty ends up indicting the reader, in a sense--we don't want Gunnar or Scoby to die, because *we like reading them so much*. They are entertaining us, and making us feel smart and critical (much like the "Holden effect"). It feels like the badness of the world can be defeated by intelligent humor, but Beatty is, in the end, even more apparently cynical about that possibility than Salinger is.
ReplyDeleteI really love your comparison to Holden, but I think Gunnar can also be sort of compared to Holden as well. He doesn't get kicked out of the college, but he stops attending the classes, he likes just being, and the narration is pretty funny. Just like how Holden just wants to be the literal "catcher in the rye" all Scoby wants to do is hang out with Gunnar and play a game of basketball where nobody is expecting anything from him. The idea that they both can achieve this and deal with it differently can be seen because of the racial aspect that Beatty goes into as opposed to Salinger.
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